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This month we will be having a game event coinciding with Eid al-adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice. It will begin Tuesday, August 21st and conclude on Sunday, August 26th. Players of all levels will be able to participate. Like last year, there will be a raffle associated with the event, with ten players winning the prize this time around. More details will be forthcoming.

We've put together a list of code projects we plan on working on during the latter half of the year. First on the list are what we are going to call “encounters”. These will be mini-events that are randomly generated throughout the game. You may encounter a friendly patrols of soldiers, a band of highwaymen or a pack of wolves. We plan on making some ocean-themed ones, as well, that one might encounter while sailing a ship.

Speaking of ships, they will be gaining weapon systems and attack options such a ramming and boarding. A feature of oceanic encounters will be ship-to-ship combat with pirates, which may leading to boarding and capturing the enemy vessel, and then towing it back to port to sell for salvage.

There will be additional upgrades for available for ships beyond weapons, such as cargo holds. With these cargo holds we will give players the ability to be free traders, purchasing commodities at one port and selling them at another. Note that we want to have high seas encounters implemented before ship-based trading, otherwise there will be no risk involved.

To facilitate this, shipyards are going to be expanded. While all shipyards will be safe harbors for players to park their vessels, we will adding code to control whether ship building, ship repair, weapon packages and upgrades and other options are available at a particular port. This allows us to greatly expand the scope of ports, so that more ports can be placed in the world where they make sense.

Trading will involve four commodities (in order of cheapest to most expensive): raw materials, foodstuffs, finished goods, and luxury items. The availability of each will vary from port to port. Prices and profits will be controlled by an adjudication system that measures the distance from seller port to buyer port and worldwide availability of a certain commodity. We will provide a world port list so players can quickly decide when and where to trade.

We will be adding jobs for crafting, fishing, butchering, skinning, mining, and hunting when it gets done. In particular we would like to make a low-level woodcutting job for the newbie islands.

The current plan for hunting is to have the player go into a hunting state with additional commands for catching up to or catching prey. Hunting begins with the track command that lets you discover animal tracks and attempt to identify them. Once you've found tracks, you can choose to pursue your prey, use bait to lure them to you, or lie in ambush in the hopes that they come back your way. Different strategies will work better with different animals.

There are also a host of smaller projects that are primarily quality-of-life improvements. These include Inter-room ranged weapons, Account-based mudmails so any character on your account can read any other character's mail and mass mudmails for sending carbon copy and to a whole clan, the ability to replay grouptells or notifies, account-based banking options and mercenary hirelings.

In the near future, some minor combat-related tweaks in the work for more variety and fun, such as making flourish usable unarmed if you know unarmed combat. We're also working on an attribute-based restringing ability for crafted objects called "craft restring". This will let you turn "an electrum signet ring set with a sard cabochon" into "an electrum signet ring of insight" and similar transformations. You will not be able to add upgrades to restrung crafted objects, but the change will be reversible. We would also like to add holy symbols to god entries and give the ability for followers of gods to add holy symbols to crafted objects using heraldry.

Next month should see new area releases: a level 41 zone for Suboria called The Dragon's Dish, and a level 40 area for the Dunn Hurr called Cape Sovestia.